OnePlus 5T hands-on—OnePlus offers $800 design at a $499 price

Ron Amadeo

OnePlus is back with another end-of-year "T" upgrade for its flagship. Last year it bumped the OnePlus 3 to "3T" with a slightly newer processor and a bigger battery. This year, there's not much in the way of new specs to boast about, but the OnePlus 5T has an all-new front. OnePlus has taken a big leap with the 5T and modernized the design with slim bezels, software navigation buttons, and a rear fingerprint reader. This makes it look a lot like every other 2017 flagship, but the key for OnePlus is that the 5T is only $499 (€499, £449). This means you get flagship-class specs and design for $300 less than the competition.

OnePlus' slim bezel design means the front is now sporting a 6-inch, 2160×1080 OLED display with an extra-tall 18:9 aspect ratio. OnePlus describes this as an "AMOLED" display, which is a Samsung trademark, so this is a Samsung display. Sure enough, you get a high-quality, crystal clear image even at low brightness, with none of the issues that have been plaguing LG-made OLED displays. Slimming down the bezels means removing nearly everything from the front that isn't made of pixels, so in addition to moving the fingerprint reader to the back, the OnePlus 5's capacitive navigation buttons are gone, replaced with on-screen buttons. The result is that OnePlus can upgrade from a 5.5-inch screen to 6 inches while keeping the phone body essentially the same size. In person, the OnePlus 5T looks every bit as good as an $800-$1,000 flagship smartphone.

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